Friday, former Trump Campaign Adviser George Papadopoulos was sentenced to 14 days in jail. The sentence is out of the norm for such offenses, but the judge wanted to make an example of Papadopoulos.
Papadopoulos was sentenced to two weeks behind bars for, “for lying to the F.B.I. about his contacts with Russian intermediaries before the 2016 election, with the judge saying he wanted to send a message to the public about the consequences of impeding an inquiry of national import,” reports The New York Times.
Mr. Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty last year, is the first Trump campaign adviser to be sentenced as part of the continuing investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Three others pleaded guilty or were convicted of felonies and await sentencing.Though lying to federal investigators is not typically punished by incarceration, United States District Judge Randolph D. Moss said that Mr. Papadopoulos deserved prison time because he had deceived investigators probing “a matter of grave national importance.” He also fined him $9,500 and ordered him to complete 200 hours of community service and one year of probation after his release.Prosecutors argued that Mr. Papadopoulos’s repeated lies during a January 2017 interview with federal investigators stymied the inquiry at a critical moment. In part because Mr. Papadopoulos misled authorities, they said in court papers, they failed to arrest a London-based professor — suspected of being a Russian operative — before he left the United States in February 2017, never to return….“I wanted to distance myself as much as possible — and Trump himself and the campaign — from what was probably an illegal action or dangerous information,” he said. At the time of the F.B.I. interview, he said, he was being considered for a job in the Trump administration and was concerned about where the escalating investigation might lead. He made no suggestion that anyone else on the Trump campaign or in the administration had directed him to lie.“You know,” he added, “I never felt that I did anything against my country’s interests.”
The NYT questioned Trump about the incident Friday, to which he responded, “I see Papadopoulos today; I don’t know Papadopoulos, I don’t know,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “They got him, on I guess, on a couple of lies.”
Though later, Trump tweeted:
Which is just hilarious.
No doubt, the Trump/Russia collusion delusion brigade will insist it’s a harbinger of Trump’s imminent doom. Again. For the fifty billionth time.
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